The Impact of Large-scale Employee Share Ownership Plans on Labour Productivity: The Case of Eircom

Large-scale Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs) have been a distinctive characteristic of Irish public enterprise reform, with shareholdings of 14.9 per cent being allocated to employees as part of firm restructuring and privatisation programmes. This paper presents a case study analysis of a large-scale ESOP in Eircom, Ireland’s former national telecommunications operator. We identify changes in labour productivity during the eight years before and after the establishment of the company’s ESOP and use a framework based on Pierce et al. (2001, 1991) to explore the role played by the ESOP. The ESOP was found to play a key role in enabling firm-level reform through concession bargaining and changes in employee relations, and thereby indirectly affecting labour productivity. However, despite the substantial shareholding and influence of the ESOP, we find it has failed to create a sense of psychological ownership among employees, and thereby further impact on productivit

Rebuttal to Hasan and Pedraza in comments and controversies: "Improving the reliability of manual and automated methods for hippocampal and amygdala volume measurements"

Here we address the critiques offered by Hasan and Pedraza to our recently published manuscript comparing the performance of two automated segmentation programs, FSL/FIRST and FreeSurfer (Morey R, Petty C, Xu Y, Pannu Hayes J, Wagner H, Lewis D, LaBar K, Styner M, McCarthy G. (2009): A comparison of automated segmentation and manual tracing for quantifying of hippocampal and amygdala volumes. Neuroimage 45:855-866). We provide an assessment and discussion of their specific critiques. Hasan and Pedraza bring up some important points concerning our omission of sample demographic features and inclusion of left and right hemisphere volumes as independent measures in correlational analyses. We present additional data on demographic attributes of our sample and correlations analyzed separately on left and right hemispheres of the amygdala and hippocampus. While their commentary aids the reader to more critically asses our study, it falls short of substantiating that our omissions ought to lead readers to significantly revise their interpretations. Further research will help to disentangle the advantages and limitations of the various freely-available automated segmentation software packages

A Process and Outcome Evaluation of a Shelter for Homeless Young Women

To evaluate the processes and outcomes of a short-term shelter, both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered via participant observation, focus group interviews with shelter staff and residents, and individual interviews with a sample of 40 young women who had been homeless prior to using the shelter. The process evaluation showed that the shelter staff strived to utilize an empowerment philosophy in their relationships with residents, but that there were many challenges to implementing this philosophy. The outcome evaluation showed that, at a 3-month follow-up, the participants reported significant improvements in housing, income, independence, and life satisfaction, but most continued to experience poverty and a number of other difficulties. The results were discussed in terms of the implications for future research and the value and limitations of shelters for dealing with homeless youth. The need for more sustained and comprehensive program interventions and supportive social policies was underscored

Residential mobility and childhood leukemia.

AimsStudies of environmental exposures and childhood leukemia studies do not usually account for residential mobility. Yet, in addition to being a potential risk factor, mobility can induce selection bias, confounding, or measurement error in such studies. Using data collected for California Powerline Study (CAPS), we attempt to disentangle the effect of mobility.MethodsWe analyzed data from a population-based case-control study of childhood leukemia using cases who were born in California and diagnosed between 1988 and 2008 and birth certificate controls. We used stratified logistic regression, case-only analysis, and propensity-score adjustments to assess predictors of residential mobility between birth and diagnosis, and account for potential confounding due to residential mobility.ResultsChildren who moved tended to be older, lived in housing other than single-family homes, had younger mothers and fewer siblings, and were of lower socioeconomic status. Odds ratios for leukemia among non-movers living <50 meters (m) from a 200+ kilovolt line (OR: 1.62; 95% CI: 0.72-3.65) and for calculated fields ≥ 0.4 microTesla (OR: 1.71; 95% CI: 0.65-4.52) were slightly higher than previously reported overall results. Adjustments for propensity scores based on all variables predictive of mobility, including dwelling type, increased odds ratios for leukemia to 2.61 (95% CI: 1.76-3.86) for living < 50 m from a 200 + kilovolt line and to 1.98 (1.11-3.52) for calculated fields. Individual or propensity-score adjustments for all variables, except dwelling type, did not materially change the estimates of power line exposures on childhood leukemia.ConclusionThe residential mobility of childhood leukemia cases varied by several sociodemographic characteristics, but not by the distance to the nearest power line or calculated magnetic fields. Mobility appears to be an unlikely explanation for the associations observed between power lines exposure and childhood leukemia

A full-scale tidal blade fatigue test using the FastBlade facility

Fatigue testing of tidal turbine blades requires the application of cyclic loads without the ability to match the natural frequency of the blade due to their high stiffness and the associated thermal issues of testing composite materials at those frequencies (i.e., 18–20 Hz). To solve this, loading the blades with an auxiliary system is necessary; in most cases, a conventional hydraulic system tends to be highly energy-demanding and inefficient. A regenerative digital displacement hydraulic pump system was employed in the FastBlade fatigue testing facility, which saved up to 75 % compared to a standard hydraulic system. A series of equivalent target loads were defined using Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) simulations (based on on-site collected water velocity data) and utilised in FastBlade to demonstrate an efficient way to perform fatigue testing. During the test, a series of measurements were performed on the blade response and the Fastblade test structure itself, providing novel insights into the mechanical behaviour of a blade, and enabling improved testing practice for FastBlade. Without catastrophic failure, the blade withstood the principal tidal loading for 20 years (equivalent). This test data will enable FastBlade to identify improvements to the testing procedures, i.e., control strategies, load introduction, instrumentation layout, instrument calibration, and test design

A multilevel neo-institutional analysis of infection prevention and control in English hospitals: coerced safety culture change?

Despite committed policy, regulative and professional efforts on healthcare safety, little is known about how such macro-interventions permeate organisations and shape culture over time. Informed by neo-institutional theory, we examined how inter-organisational influences shaped safety practices and inter-subjective meanings following efforts for coerced culture change. We traced macro-influences from 2000 to 2015 in infection prevention and control (IPC). Safety perceptions and meanings were inductively analysed from 130 in-depth qualitative interviews with senior- and middle-level managers from 30 English hospitals. A total of 869 institutional interventions were identified; 69% had a regulative component. In this context of forced implementation of safety practices, staff experienced inherent tensions concerning the scope of safety, their ability to be open and prioritisation of external mandates over local need. These tensions stemmed from conflicts among three co-existing institutional logics prevalent in the NHS. In response to requests for change, staff flexibly drew from a repertoire of cognitive, material and symbolic resources within and outside their organisations. They crafted 'strategies of action', guided by a situated assessment of first-hand practice experiences complementing collective evaluations of interventions such as 'pragmatic', 'sensible' and also 'legitimate'. Macro-institutional forces exerted influence either directly on individuals or indirectly by enriching the organisational cultural repertoire

Phenomenology of the Lense-Thirring effect in the Solar System

Recent years have seen increasing efforts to directly measure some aspects of the general relativistic gravitomagnetic interaction in several astronomical scenarios in the solar system. After briefly overviewing the concept of gravitomagnetism from a theoretical point of view, we review the performed or proposed attempts to detect the Lense-Thirring effect affecting the orbital motions of natural and artificial bodies in the gravitational fields of the Sun, Earth, Mars and Jupiter. In particular, we will focus on the evaluation of the impact of several sources of systematic uncertainties of dynamical origin to realistically elucidate the present and future perspectives in directly measuring such an elusive relativistic effect.Comment: LaTex, 51 pages, 14 figures, 22 tables. Invited review, to appear in Astrophysics and Space Science (ApSS). Some uncited references in the text now correctly quoted. One reference added. A footnote adde

Visualising text co-occurrence networks

We present a tool for automatically generating a visual summary of unstructured text data retrieved from documents, web sites or social media feeds. Unlike tools such as word clouds, we are able to visualise structures and topic relationships occurring in a document. These relationships are determined by a unique approach to co-occurrence analysis. The algorithm applies a decaying function to the distance between word pairs found in the original text such that words regularly occurring close to each other score highly, but even words occurring some distance apart will make a small contribution to the overall co-occurrence score. This is in contrast to other algorithms which simply count adjacent words or use a sliding window of fixed size. We show, with examples, how the network generated can be presented in tree or graph format. The tree format allows for the user to interact with the visualisation and expand or contract the data to a preferred level of detail. The tool is available as a web application and can be viewed using any modern web browse

Control de cambios / Rastrea los cambios / El camino cambia: Reflexiones sobre un mundo en transformación

“Track changes: Reflecting on a transforming world” was the theme chosen to invite panels, papers, posters and alternative presentations to be part of the 2019 international congress of SIEF that was held in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia (Spain). This introduction includes a description of the content of the congress, the rationale of the choice of plenaries and some reflections about the outcomes of the congress.El lema elegido para presentar paneles, ponencias, posters y presentaciones en formatos alternativos para el congreso internacional 2019 de SIEF -que tuvo lugar en Santiago de Compostela, Galicia (España)- fue “Track changes: Reflecting on a transforming world”. Esta introducción incluye una descripción del contenido del congreso, la idea para la elección de las plenarias y algunas reflexiones sobre los resultados del congreso. &nbsp

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results